Find Us On

Religious Right Seeks New Catholic-Protestant Unity

The message of Frederick Clarkson's article "Christian Right Seeks Renewal in Deepening Catholic-Protestant Alliance," for Political Research Associates, has garnered additional online comment. (See Religious Right Watch's early post.)

Paul Rosenberg of Crooks and Liars notes that Clarkson argues that although seemingly on the defensive,

leading conservative Catholics (including Church leadership) and evangelical Protestants have just in the last few years become more politically unified than ever before in their history, and this newly-achieved unity — something never really seen before — needs to be viewed as potentially deeply threatening.

Ultra-conservative lawmakers aligned with the Tea Party hold sway in more than 20 states, and they are passing a wave of regressive anti-abortion bills.
At the same time, we’re seeing a constant barrage of legislative assaults on public education through vouchers and other schemes as well as various proposals designed to undermine church-state separation.

Clarkson...points to the Manhattan Declaration, a document released in 2010 by an alliance of prominent Religious Right figures and ultra-conservative Catholic leaders. I attended the press conference when the document was unveiled. I recall being struck by its openly theocratic overtones. It looked like an attempt to drag the world back to the Dark Ages.
.....One of the engineers of the Manhattan Declaration was Robert P. George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton who is known for his extreme opposition to gay rights and his insistence that same-sex unions violate “natural law.”... George’s fans hail him as a brilliant thinker. He’s well connected politically and was recently named the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.